Meet Kaleb Oh of Gravity x Catalyst in West Hollywood

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kaleb Oh.

Kaleb, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Gravity x Catalyst is actually a combination of two separate brands, Gravity LA and Catalyst Jewelry. My wife, Abby Lozares and I, Sejin Oh, started Gravity LA 4 years ago and was looking to open a brick and mortar. We had met Olivia and Steven Hartono (Founders of Catalyst Jewelry) a few years back and heard they were also looking to open a store. So, we partnered together to open Gravity x Catalyst. Gravity LA was started to raise funds to donate to missionaries overseas and transformed into a full-fledged brand focused on incredibly soft, US made tees. Catalyst Jewelry was started to empower women by creating handmade, affordable luxury pieces where the proceeds would be donated to ending human trafficking.

We opened the store in April 2017, with all handmade fixtures built by the owners themselves. We wanted to bring something beautiful yet simple to the lower la brea community. It’s been a tough journey of figuring out what sells, how to sell it, and just learning to work together in partnership with each other. It has been humbling as well as extremely rewarding to be able to be a part of the la brea community and to partner with other local brands such as Flores Lane candles, AKR designs, Milkyway cases, etc.

We were also able to run a toy drive for a local Echo Park elementary for under-privileged kids and it was such an amazing experience to personally hand presents to the kids during the holiday season. We hope to partner with more local brands as we grow and to become a bigger part and contributor to our community.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely has NOT been a smooth road. The biggest struggle was learning to work together in a partnership. We had many arguments and struggles in the beginning just trying to learn how the other think and work. However, eventually we began to learn and actually understand each other and since then it has been such a blessing to have another couple to share the workload with.

Many times, aesthetics or strategies clash and it’s really all about compromise, learning how to compromise and to pick your battles.

Gravity x Catalyst – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We take pride in the fact that everything we do comes genuinely from just who we are. Starting from just the build out of the store, everything was DIY. I hand built every single fixture in the entire store because it saved us money. It was my first time ever building for an entire store and it wasn’t an easy task but thanks to Pinterest, it all worked out in the end 🙂

For both of our brands, it’s just the two of us that do everything. We wear every hat in our company, from sewing and hangtagging each of our pieces to marketing and figuring out legal stuff. I’d say in a way we take pride in the “mom and pop”-ness of our brands.

For Gravity LA, we pride ourselves in the softness and quality of our products. We have customers that we’ve had since the beginning that still buy from us because they know that our products last.

For Catalyst Jewelry, they take pride in the fact that every piece of jewelry is unique, handmade and that the money the customers pay doesn’t go to some corporation but it all goes to something good.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
The proudest moment for myself would have to be the fact that we are still alive. We’ve had to make some strategy changes recently and I’m proud of the fact that I was able to see what wasn’t working in our company and to cut those parts out before it was too late.

We started doing wholesale and trade shows a few years back and although it was exciting to say that we had a booth at Magic Tradeshow, which is one of the biggest fashion tradeshows in the world, I realized that it was just too much of a cost and liability to keep doing those shows.

Wholesale for us was difficult as we had to meet factory minimums for each style while buyers we met at Magic were placing orders for just a few pieces. It didn’t make sense to make 200 pieces of one style just to fulfill a 16-piece order.

The strange thing is, as soon as we decided to stop our wholesale, we started getting big name buyers coming to us out of the blue asking us for wholesale!

Contact Info:

• Address: 620 1/2 S. La Brea Ave
  Los Angeles, CA 90036
• Website: www.gravityxcatalyst.com
• Phone: 323-746-5332
• Email: info@gravityla.org
• Instagram: gravityla & catalystjewelry
• Facebook: facebook.com/gravityxcatalyst
• Yelp: gravity x catalyst

Image Credit:
Christina Cho Photography, Abby Lozares